Okay, finished the game. The ending was great, I absolutely look forward to SC, even though I kinda fear that I won't be able to play it. (Thanks to the dying PSP market and me being European -- I don't know if I will be able to play it if XSeed should decide to release it download-only or something. Here's hoping that they decide to release the PC versions too).
Generally, though, my impressions are kind of a mixed bag. I really enjoyed the game and I had a lot of fun with it, but there are certain points I didn't like so much.
The characters are great. Estelle and Joshua are two of the most memorable RPG leads in existence and the same is true for the side-characters. They are thought out really well, and they hit the middle-ground between stereotypical archetypes and interesting personalities.
The story itself though, is for the most part your average JRPG story. It takes some interesting turns towards the end, but most of Estelle's and Joshua's journey is exactly what you have seen in roundabout a billion other RPGs. I'm not critisizing the light-heartedness of the story, though, I just don't think that most of the events are very imaginative. The story progression is slow, but that didn't matter to me. I like slow-paced stories that take the time to flesh out the world and characters and Trails fits that bill.
The worldview on the other hand nearly makes up for the plot shortcomings. Nearly. Falcom has made a world that actually feels credible. The world has a story, the inhabitants are nice, there are many nice things to discover that are actually completely useless, but they are there. Some of the sidequests - like collecting the novel chapters - are so bad and involve so much stupid running and being at random places at a
specific time that I from time to time got fed up by the world, though.
Generally, I think that the sidequest system is rather bad. Even if you check the guilds constantly it's easy to miss a few. And since you don't have a clue when they are going to expire, I felt kinda forced to do every single available quest immediately.
I love sidequests, they are adding so much to the world of a game and they make it feel more vivid and credible, but as soon as I feel forced by the game to do the quests now rather than later - even though right now I would like to continue in the actual story - it becomes frustrating easily.
Gameplay-wise it's nothing special. The areas are rather tubey, the battle system is cool, but in the end it's just yet another RPG. That's not bad, though, and I think it has some very nice features (being able to save any time is fantastic, same goes for the lack of a game over screen), but it can become tedious at times.
I don't think anyone plays Trails expecting great gameplay. It's a game about the characters and story. And that's where it's great -- the time spent reading is definitely the best time.
The only area that leaves me disappointed is the soundtrack, actually. There are only a few tracks I really liked, and many really became annoying rather quickly -- the battle theme for example. I hate that battle theme.
My enjoyment might have been hindered a bit by me getting headaches rather frequently when playing the game. I guess it's because I'm playing on a PSP-1000 and the ghosting is really incredibly awful in this game.
Oh, am I the only one who kinda dislikes the colors in this game? It's like there's a grey filter over everything.
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